Asked to respond, McCotter said, “Chuck Todd is an idiot then. Am I wrong? All right, Chuck, how did ending the campaign in September impact the gearing up to run for re-election where I would have had only that one opponent on the ballot? How did that affect my petition? The people that think that are idiots."

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Yes, well -- today, McCotter has announced that he's quitting Congress (it returns to work next week), confirming for all time that he was just bored with the job. "The recent event's totality of calumnies, indignities and deceits," he said, "have weighed most heavily upon my family."

While our family takes this step into the rest of our lives, we do so with the ultimate confidence in our country's future. True, as at other times in the life of our nation, we live in an Age of Extremes that prizes intensity over sanity; rhetoric over reality; and destruction over creation. But this too shall pass, thanks to the infinite, inspired wisdom of the sovereign people who, with God's continued blessings, will again affirm for the generations American Exceptionalism.

This was how McCotter talked. In another era, where voters got to know their candidates via newspaper print-ups of their speeches, his combination of long nouns and long adjectives might have gotten him somewhere. Alas.